Spiritual Growth and Recovery Procedures
Revelation 3:2-3: “Be
watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I
have not found your works perfect before God. Remember therefore how you have
received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore you will not watch,
I will come on you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come.”
All of verse 2 and the first
part of verse 3 focus on how to be watchful. The second half of verse 3 takes
the other negative view: If you will not be watchful. In other words, there is
a chance here to recover. God’s grace is still going to provide. No matter how
much of our life has been messed up God has a plan for our life. The plan
includes the A,B, Cs of the spiritual life and we just
have to go back to implementation. It may be difficult because by now, in the
church at
“If therefore you will not
watch, I will come on you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will
come.” This is coming in judgment. If they don’t straighten up there are going
to be consequences and the Lord is going to come with judgment. It may end up
in the sin unto death or some other form of serious divine discipline, but they
won’t know when it is coming. The principle: Don’t wait for the lord to start discipline, the wake up call is right now: “Become watchful
and strengthen what remains.” That indicates the same thing that we see in the
epistle to the Hebrews. That is, you can start losing ground. You lose capacity
for righteousness, you begin to forget the doctrine that you have learned and
stored in the soul so that it is no longer usable, you begin to be dominated by
sinful habit patterns and thought patterns rather habit patterns and thought
patterns that are produced by doctrine and the Holy Spirit in your life, and
these things begin to become entrenched in your life and in your thinking. The
next thing you know you begin to wonder how you got into the mess you are in. It
took place just one step at a time, gradually and incrementally with one bad
decision after another bad decision, thinking that you could just use 1 John
1:9 and you’d get forgiveness, be right back in fellowship, and everything
would be okay. But the mandate in Scripture isn’t just to get in fellowship,
the mandate in Scripture is to abide in Christ, i.e. stay in fellowship, and
walk by means of God the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says, “Be watchful, and
strengthen the things which remain.” There is still something left from that
former maturity that they had, but they are about to die, about to be
destroyed. And He says, “I have not found your works perfect before God” So
grace provides a means of recovery. This is the same thing Paul says in
Philippians 3:13-14: “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but
this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” The issue
isn’t how badly you have failed. A guilt trip doesn’t impress God one little
bit. If you have failed in certain ways in the past and you feel guilty about
it, then you don‘t accept the promise of God forgiveness based on 1 John 1:9,
now you are compounding the sin, because not only are you living the sin in
your own thought but you are adding to it the fact that you are not believing
that God’s grace is sufficient to completely forgive the sin and to blot it
out. No matter how much you have failed you can reverse course; there is hope;
there is a future.
Now He gives that solution a
little more substance in verse 3. It begins with the command to remember. Verse
3 is a subset of verse 2. In verse 2 the command is to be watchful. How do you
be watchful? You have to remember, that is the first command. It is the Greek
verb MNEMONEUO [mnhmoneuw]
which means to remember, to recall to mind, present
active imperative; it is an ongoing practice here. This is to be a standard practice
for the believer. We have to remember something: “how you have received and
heard.” They are told that they have failed, they’ve blown it, there is no life
there now and they are living like dead men. They just have a fake reputation
now, they are living on past laurels, but the solution is to remember something:
how they grew. So there is an emphasis here on procedure. You have to know what
the procedures are for growth. They had them one time, they knew what those
procedures were for spiritual growth at one point, and they have go back and remember what those procedures are and implement
them all over again. They forgot how to stay in shape, how to exercise. They
once knew what these drills were and they need to go back and remember how they
advanced before and then they need to put that into practice all over again. The
verb for “receive” is LAMBANO [lambanw].
It is a perfect active indicative here, which is interesting because the
perfect tense always emphasizes the present reality of a completed past action.
This is something they had received in the past so that it is a complete
action. LAMBANO is a word that indicates the reception of the Word of
God and how we have learned in the past. So they are to think about how they
received the Word in the past. There is a procedure in Scripture, a mechanic,
for how we take in the Word of God.
The Holy Spirit makes the
Word understandable but it may take years before you understand it. Just
because you can repeat what a pastor says doesn’t mean you understand it. This
isn’t just a one-shot event, you don’t just come in and sit down, confess your
sins, and the Holy Spirit is going to make it understandable, so you go out and
understand it right away. It is the Holy Spirit who over the process of time,
the more you study the Word, makes it understandable to you. He builds that
frame of reference with the basic building blocks and then constructs the
understanding brick by brick on top of that. But it is done by the Holy Spirit.
The spiritual life is a supernatural way of life. He makes it understandable
but you have to exercise your volition to understand it. It is part of what the
Old Testament talks about in terms of meditation. You have to think about it,
it is not just coming and hearing and writing a few notes. You have to think
about it, cogitate on it, and se just how you
understand it. Then you have to believe it. You can’t believe what you don’t
understand. We believe it and then God the Holy Spirit transfers it into the
core of our thinking, making it more and more real to us, and that dominates
our thinking. There is an exchange process going on here and what gets ejected
out the other side is the garbage from human viewpoint. Now we have what the
Bible called EPIGNOSIS [e)pignwsij], which is usable spiritual knowledge. It is a
storehouse of usable spiritual knowledge. We will only apply a small percentage
of what is there at any given time. Some of what you learn you may never apply
again, but it is from that reservoir of knowledge that all of your application comes.
The more you know, the more you are going to apply because the aggregate is
going to continue to increase. So we have to learn more and more so that that
small amount of application continues to increase. We don’t learn this to go on
some sort of intellectual head trip, we learn this so
that everything else eventually makes sense. Everything in God’s created is
interconnected.
Once we get this storehouse
of knowledge, then comes application. That, again,
involves volition. We have to decide in this circumstance that we are going to
apply the Word. So the Sardis Christians said: “Remember how you received and
heard? Remember that process? You sat under the pastor, you fellowshipped, you
thought about it, meditated upon it, God the Holy Spirit made it real to you
and it became usable doctrine. You used it and applied.” You have to remember,
you have to go back to that all over again.
“…hold fast” is the word that He uses next. This is the Greek word TEREO [threw] which means to focus on something, to make it a priority. Then He uses the word “repent” which means to change your mind or to change your thinking. It isn’t a one-shot decision, it isn’t a synonym for confessing your sins. It is a statement that what has happened to these operationally dead believers in Sardis is that they have gotten so far away from divine viewpoint that they are thinking like unbelievers. They have to change the way they think. When you have really gotten away from the Lord and have lost the spiritual disciplines and procedures it is difficult. But God gives the grace to be able to do it. You have to stop and think about what your priorities are, how you are spending your time every day. Are you really spending enough time in the Word? Are you too busy with work and other details to make a study of the Word your priority? We have to get back to making that a priority. It is not enough to make a plan, we have to work the plan. The process of recovery takes a lot of work because you have to undo a lot of bad habits, mental habits, priority habits, times use habits, and you have to replace those with wise doctrinal priorities and time-use habits. It is the process of Romans 12:1, 2: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies [your whole life] a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind [renovation of thought], that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”